Assessment

The HDB chapter has a lot of interesting and practical things of assessment in second language teaching (it's also ironical that we are reading it the last week of the semester, I find).
It seems that everything is clear with standardized tests, except for how exactly to interpret the results, but still, if you are more or less familiar with the scale/system, the news that someone got a 575 on paper based TOEFL will actually make sense to you.

Something I have been struggling with this semester is assessing/grading larger and more open-ended items, like essays. Even with well-defined criteria there still is a lot of opportunities for the rater's personality to act out. I was having a somewhat hard time grading some of the essays that my students submitted at some point, mostly because the stories were overly personal.

Class reflection

It was very interesting to hear/see Dr. Lybeck's presentation one more time. Since this time I had a pretty good idea of what it was about, I was able to pay more attention to the fine details. It was especially useful, since I am now thinking about how to integrate CBI in my comp class (considering that I have already chosen the textbooks).

The peer review was helpful as usual and so was the presentation about making poster presentations.